Halloween 2015: Top 5 real-life horror incidents that took place on the scary night of 31 October

Halloween is back and it brings along with it a whole sense of creepiness. There is a certain charm to listening to horror stories during this time of the year. Be it the mystical tales or the costumes or the feel that surrounds Halloween -- there's something about this day that definitely makes you feel like there's something spooky in the air.

People across the globe live up to the spirit of Halloween by carving pumpkins, trick or treating or by slipping into their favourite character get-up. But there are some others, who literally dress "to kill".

Sad, but true, the scariest night of year -- Halloween -- has witnessed its share of real-life horror incidents with some spine-chilling crimes that have occurred on 31 October.

Here are top 5 crimes that occurred on 31 October and these will make you wonder if they were driven by the spook of "Halloween".

- In 2005: One of the scariest incidents happened in Frederica, Delaware, where locals saw the body of a 42-year-old woman hanging from a tree. It was left suspended in public for hours as everyone assumed her corpse to be yet another Halloween display.

- In 2012: A nine-year-old Pennsylvania girl dressed in a Halloween black costume, paired with black hat and a white tassel, was accidentally shot by a relative who mistook her for a skunk.

- In 1992: A 16-year-old foreign exchange student Yoshihiro Hattori was shot and killed in Louisiana after he knocked on the wrong door in search of a Halloween party. Yoshihiro was with his fellow exchange student Webb Haymaker when they tried to get into the house assuming that was where the party was happening.

- In 1990: During a Halloween party, a 17-year-old William Anthony Odem, from North Carolina, accidentally hung himself while performing a dramatic hallows scene. He was pretending to hang from a gallows as part of a Halloween hayride, but died when the stunt went wrong.

- In 1974: One of the most famous Halloween crimes which still shakes the faith in parenthood. Ronald Clark O'Bryan, from was executed in the US for killing his eight-year-old son Timothy by feeding him a cyanide-laced candy on Halloween night. The father of two, from Pasadena, Texas, had taken a huge life insurance policy on his two children. He plotted this murder, obviously to claim the policy money. To make his crime believable, he fed the same candy to four other children. But only his son died. O'Bryan was executed on in March 1984.